


Meet me in the bus

by Bersenev



Category: Original Work
Genre: Canon Bisexual Character, Canon Trans Character, Fluff, Gender Dysphoria, Gender Identity, M/M, Romance, Slow Burn, Strangers to Friends to Lovers, Trans Character, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-09
Updated: 2017-11-09
Packaged: 2019-01-31 06:21:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12676146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bersenev/pseuds/Bersenev
Summary: Caden has had a crush on his friend Elliot for two years now and it doesn't come as a surprise when said friend ultimately rejects him. Still, a reason like being "too feminine" cuts deep, even more considering that Caden is trans and all too familiar with that wording.Then again, his life would turn upside down soon enough with the appearance of a cute stranger that understands him better than Caden could have expected at first.





	Meet me in the bus

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there!
> 
> So this is a small personal work I am/want to be working on in the future!  
> As you might notice if you look at my profile I don't usually post original works, but seeing how there's not a lot of canon lgbt+ representation I decided to change that using my own experiences and some cute tropes to change that.
> 
> "Meet me in the bus" is a small lgbt+ lovestory about dysphoria, learning to co-exist and getting to know each other in a weirdly realistic yet through and through romanticized version of well falling on a stranger during a bus ride.
> 
> I have yet to proofread this chapter properly but I do hope to get around to that soon! 
> 
> So yeah maybe I could get a few of you interested in this and if yet welcome in hell together with me!

“I’m really flattered that you like me-“, Elliot had said, looking anywhere but at Caden “-but I don’t think I can see you like that. I know you’re a guy but somehow you’re just still...too feminine, you know?”  
  
Caden had kind of expected something like this when he decided to confess to his two year long crush, but that didn’t mean that it hurt any less. ‘Too feminine’; the words rang in his head like a siren. Again and again the words blared only getting louder with every turn.  
  
‘Too feminine’  
  
Well, what was he supposed to do? He bought his clothes in the men’s section, he had short hair, he tried to look a little taller by wearing sneakers with thick soles and he didn’t wear make-up or nail polish and tried to avoid overly feminine things. It’s not like he could change anything about how soft his face was, or how he just couldn’t grow any taller, or how high his voice was compared to other guys. It wasn’t his fault that his parents wouldn’t allow him to go to therapy before he turned 18.  
  
Honestly? If it was up to him he wouldn’t be this ‘feminine’ either. He wouldn’t have to put up with strangers misgendering him or with his gay crush dismissing him as a guy, but here he was, nodding as Elliot softly patted his shoulder with an apologetic smile.  
  
“But we can still be friends, right? It’s not that I don’t like you Caden. I just don’t think we’d work out as anything but friends. Sorry.”  
  
Yeah no, he was okay with this. Really, what was there to not be okay with?  
  
“Yeah that’d be great.” Caden forced himself to smile at Elliot. “I just wanted to get it out, you know? Staying friends would be great though.”  
  
He didn’t want to stay friends after this actually. It’s not that he just suddenly stopped liking Elliot, but there was a certain amount of shame you felt when your crush hinted at the fact that he saw you as a girl. A certain amount of “maybe he isn’t actually as tolerant and nice as I had thought”.  
  
After all he could have simply said “I don’t feel the same way, sorry”; there was no reason to drag anything else into the conversation. There was no reason to mention how ‘feminine’ he was if that wasn’t the very reason Elliot didn’t like him and Caden had seen pictures of Elliot’s ex. It wasn’t that he didn’t like feminine guys.  
  
So yeah, maybe Caden didn’t feel like staying friends with a guy that saw him as a girl. Maybe he didn’t feel comfortable being reminded of that all the time, of the fact that the guy he liked apparently saw him as a girl and that his body yet again kept him from being who wanted to be. Actually no, not who he wanted to be but who he was.  
  
But what good would it get him to mention this to Elliot? Maybe he’d feel ashamed of himself and there was a weird allure in seeing him realize that he was kind of a dick but it was way more likely that they’d just argue and someone started crying and all in all it wasn’t worth it. Not when Caden had already decided to bury this crush deep inside of himself and just forget that any of this ever happened.  
  
He was good at that; pretending things didn’t happen.  
  
Perhaps that just came with the whole trans and gay thing. With having people yell stuff after you and arguing over whether you knew yourself better than others.  
  
“Maybe it’s just a phase.”  
“Wouldn’t you like girls if you were a guy?”  
“Isn’t it easier to just live as a girl if you like guys anyway?”  
“You’re too feminine to be a guy.”  
  
You learned to overhear those things at some point, he mused. You had to, in a way. It wasn’t like you could just argue with every person that threw bullshit like that at you, if you did you’d never get around to living your own life.  
  
Not that you had a lot of time for that anyway with all the second guessing you did.   
  
“Is this really me?”  
“What if I am actually lying to myself?”  
“Is this the right thing to do?”  
“Is there another way?”  
“Who am I at this point?”  
  
Sometimes Caden couldn’t answer those questions. He tried to, but sometimes everything just started being too much like on nights were he tried to understand what exactly made him feel the way he did. Defining who you were wasn’t that easy when you couldn’t possibly explore it, whether that was because his dysphoria got in the way or because people didn’t let him be himself.  
  
Getting around those obstacles took time and effort and energy and eventually Caden didn’t have the energy to face all the issues head on, face all the people head on. Sometimes he had to prioritize and right now not getting a panic attack was more important than arguing with Elliot.  
  
“So I guess I’ll see you on Monday?” He said, a little too cheerful to really be convincing. Elliot didn’t seem to notice.  
  
The rest of the conversation didn’t really register in his mind, his body just going through the motions by itself. A secret handshake here, a small hug there and soon he was sitting in the bus back home, his music cranked up as high as possible to drone out the noises around him and possibly his feelings too.  
  
There were quite a lot of those actually; sadness, regret, betrayal, anger, shame, to name a few. He felt sad because his crush had rejected him, regret over having told him in the first place just to be rejected for this reason, betrayal because he had believed Elliot when he had said that Caden was a boy just like any other to him, anger over the way he had been rejected and shame for having made a fool out of himself.  
  
_Of course he’d reject you_ , he thought, _you don’t pass and you’re not attractive either_. _What could you even offer him that cis guys can’t? Nothing. You were doomed to fail from the start.  
  
_ He rubbed at his eyes angrily, willing the tears away.   
  
_He’ll find some nice cis guy that doesn’t look like a twelve year old, someone with big hands that isn’t nearly a head smaller. He’ll date a cute guy that passes with whom he won’t look like they’re a straight couple._ _You never stood a chance anyway._  
  
The bus seemed to approach his stop now, prompting him to take his earphones out to listen to the announcement. A few seconds later the robotic voice called out the station and Caden grabbed his backpack and got up just a little later than he usually would.   
  
He was just going to the door when with a sudden jolt the bus came to a halt, making Caden lose his balance and fall right into the guy sitting on the seat besides the bus door. With a bright red face he scrambled to get up a high pitched “sorry” leaving his mouth before he even registered the situation. His headphones had fallen from his shoulders and he was awkwardly leaning onto the other person, mortification rising fast.   
  
A slight chuckle made him finally look the person he just unwillingly attacked in the face.   
“No problem.” The teen smiled, his hands on Caden’s arms to help stabilize him and probably partly to untangle their limbs. “You might want to get out soon though if this is your stop, the bus driver seems impatient.” There was no malice or mockery in his voice, just slight amusement and actual concern.  
  
A quick look to the front of the bus showed that the bus driver was indeed frowning slightly at Caden, making him flush even more as he yelled a small excuse to the front, before he flashed the stranger a quick grateful smile and hurried out of the bus, not noticing much else, like the small pull from where his headphones had tangled somewhere during his fall. He did however see the stranger smiling at him from inside once Caden got out and Caden waved at him lightly, smiling back before the bus disappeared behind a row of houses.  
  
For a moment he forgot about the horrible confession scene that had transpired just half an hour before.   
  
He wouldn’t mind seeing this guy again.  
  
However, like every moment even this small distraction didn’t last long. Caden quietly went through the empty apartment up to his room, closing the door behind him softly in stark contrast to how he preceded to throw his shoes and backpack into random directions before he climbed onto his bed.  
  
It had just been a matter of time before his brain caught up with his situation and the first tears streamed down his face. Despite everything else that went through his head he had just been rejected by his crush and sure he ended up being kind of a dick but that didn’t change months of pining and hoping that maybe he liked him back.  
  
It didn’t change that there suddenly was an answer to the question of whether Elliot liked him. Whether he sometimes thought about Caden in the evening and just started smiling or whether he sometimes caught himself looking over to Caden in class and just getting so very distracted that he couldn’t even imagine himself focusing on the text in front of him anymore.   
  
All the ‘What if’s’ and thoughts of what dating Elliot would be like were crushed just like that and it hurt. Of course it hurt. Caden had thought he was prepared for what being rejected felt like but nothing could really prepare you for the real thing.  
  
The worst thing about the situation was that being rejected didn’t suddenly end his crush. He knew that he’d still find himself looking at Elliot in the middle of class and that he’d sometimes look at his hands and imagine what holding them would feel like, but now it all came with this certain bitterness, this frustration with himself for daring to entertain these thoughts.  
  
For the second time that day he angrily rubbed at his eyes, willing the tears to stop. He didn’t want to feel sad about someone like Elliot turning him down. He didn’t even want to date a guy that called him ‘too feminine’, but somehow that just made everything so much worse. Caden had spent months idolizing Elliot and feeling like he was the one and now that version of his friend didn’t exist anymore.  
  
He wasn’t even sure anymore what he had liked about Elliot. Sure, they were friends and got along well but that wasn’t why he had liked him. Maybe it was just because Elliot was the first one to really treat him like any other guy or because he was the first openly gay guy that he knew that seemed to like him too. Maybe he was just the only guy that felt...available in a sense.  
  
Thinking about it that way sickened Caden to an extent he hadn’t deemed possible. He couldn’t possibly be that shallow, could he? The longer he thought about it the more plausible it seemed to him and the nausea kept getting worse until he decided to stop thinking about it for now.  
  
He rubbed over his eyes one last time before he tried to pull his phone out of his pocket, groaning in annoyance when it wasn’t there. It was small things like this that made a bad day even worse in his opinion. A string of annoyed noises left him as he got up and slowly slouched towards his backpack to look for his phone.  
  
He opened the first zipper and found nothing, not yet thinking anything of it. It happened that he put his mobile in random places during the school day. After the second zipper he remembered that he had used his phone to listen to music during the bus ride, so he looked down at his jeans. There obviously was no phone in those pockets. Or headphones...thinking about headphones hadn’t he felt something when he fell into the stranger?  
  
For a moment Caden wrecked his brain to remember what exactly happened when it suddenly hit him. His earphones had tangled around the strangers backpack and when he stood up they probably tightened and his phone got pulled out of his pocket. He knew the shitty pockets on women’s jeans would be his downfall at some point. Talk about bad day.  
  
Now usually Caden would freak out right about now, after all it was his phone we are talking about here. All his pictures and music and apps were on there and he couldn’t really afford to get a new one right now either. However, something about the thought that he might see the person again if they decided to give his mobile back to him nearly seemed worth trying to spend a weekend without it-  
  
-but only nearly.   
  
Either way he was too exhausted from all the crying and emotions that he had to deal with in the last few hours to think too much about it and if there was a good thing coming out of this it was that he couldn’t obsessively check whether Elliot had send him any messages.  
  
It would be okay. With that in mind he looked at the clock and decided that 5pm was a good time to go and prepare some dinner before his mom came back from work.  
  
Her work had been kind of hectic lately and forced her to stay overtime most of the days. After the third day Caden had decided to just make dinner so it was ready when she came back home, so she’d have a little less stress and they could still eat together at least.  
  
A look into the fridge told him that he’d have to go shopping tomorrow, but he could still cook something with the things that had, even though it was just spaghetti with some vegetables. He didn’t necessarily enjoy cooking dinner, he noted as he took out the pot and filled it with water, putting it on the stove. But he also didn’t have much of a chance in a situation like this.   
  
Waiting for his mother to make dinner was out of the question with how exhausted she was and just not eating wasn’t good either because his mother would just go to sleep without food then too.  
  
He put some salt in the water and started cutting the vegetables for the sauce while he waited for the water to cook. Mostly it just felt kind of dull to him. Sure cooking could be fun if you prepared more than just a simple meal out of necessity but he really didn’t have the time or patience to cook some great feast every day.  
  
He sighed while he put the spaghetti into the boiling water. It really was such a mind numbing activity and while it did serve to distract him from his heartbreak he still wasn’t in the mood for it and now he didn’t even have his phone to listen to some music while chopping zucchini.   
  
Did the stranger even notice that Caden had lost his phone? What if he didn’t pick it up? Caden wasn’t sure where he’d get his phone back if the stranger didn’t pick it up and gave it back to him on Monday. What did you even do when you lose your phone? Should he go to the police station and ask if someone returned it?  
  
Honestly what a hassle, this day was bound to give Caden a headache.   
  
He was honestly just so ready for this weekend to be over.  



End file.
